Don't know what the future is, but for sure, previous versions of windows are receding into the past without support and disconnect for drivers.
 
Wish I could stay with win XP. Rock stable powerhouse supporting my M-Audio sound card. Nothing works any more though when I try to upgrade some piece of software. XP fading out faster than I'm fading out.
 
Read that there will be no win 11, just refinements to win 10. We can only hope that driver and software conflicts will be ironed out over time. Higher probability is that they will be. Burden is on the little guys having to make their product viable in the brave new world.
 
As much as I hate the transition, short of going with a Mac or Linus, got to bite the bullet and get on board with win 10, and pray that they work out the bugs. We don't really have a lot of other options over time.
 
John

The last few WIN 10 forced upgrades have been brutal.
 
Hardly ever had any audio dropouts before, now they seem to happen every day.
 
I uninstalled a bunch of updates and things seem to be better.  I am leaving upgrades off for the next little while
 
JR

telecharge
 
I waited until the last minute for the "free" upgrade to Windows 10. It looks nice and has a few new features I'm liking, but this is the worst version of Windows I've ever used. No contest.

I did the same thing, only at the last minute, I didn't jump.  Still running smoothly under 8.1 here. 
 
I'm going to upgrade my DAW PC anyway next year (along with Win 10), so the "free" aspect didn't have as much sway on me as others.  Thank goodness.

JonD
I did the same thing, only at the last minute, I didn't jump.  Still running smoothly under 8.1 here. 

Yeah, I'm a little jealous. Windows 8.1 was not well liked either due to Microsoft shoving the Metro/Modern interface down our collective throats, but it ran like a champ for me.

My music computer is off-line except for Sonar and a couple of other updates.  I have completely turned off my Win 10 updates because everything is running fine right now and I didn't want to mess it up.

emeraldsoul
I didn't upgrade to Win10 strictly because Roland didn't have a driver for my RD-700GX keyboard. It's a $2,000 keyboard. What up, Roland???
 
-Tom

It may still work by right-click and setting compatibility to your previous OS. Do this for the install file and the drivers. Worked for me several times.

I opted for the free upgrade to Windows 10, from Windows 7 32-bit, at the very last minute.
 
I activated the upgrade via the 32-bit version of Win 7 Pro that was running on the PC (64-bit hardware), then downloaded the 64-bit installer via MS's Media Creation Tool. Nice way to get a free Windows bit architecture upgrade.
 
Then wiped the hard drive and clean installed the 64-bit version of Windows 10 Pro x64 v1511.  Ran the updates. Installed my hardware drivers.
 
Installed Sonar Platinum x64.  Everything works great.  My M-Audio FW410 works well with the Windows 7 drivers from M-Audio.  This seems to be the best Windows yet 
 
I use a few simple methods to control when Windows updates are run.  And I always take a disk image backup before running the MS updates.  I have avoided the Windows 10 Anniversary Update v1607.  I see no need for it yet.

This may be the way to go for now. I've already reinstalled Win10 (1607) with MS's Media Creation Tool, limited auto updates, and so far so good.
 
Before, all attempts to restore, recover, and use a disk image failed. This was my only option to fix it.